Disassembled “Throne”

Released this past Monday, Jay-Z and Kanye West’s collaborative album, “Watch the Throne,” shot to the top of the iTunes albums chart and elicited a cloudburst of criticism that seemed, at first, infinitely more interesting than the music. Andrew Nosnitsky noted how thematically atomized the album is: “It’s like they’re playing associative games, pinning tails on every keyword they’ve written on their dry erase board: ego, fame, God, race relations, death, legacy, upward mobility, expensive sh*t, sh*t that is more expensive than that expensive sh*t, the most expensive sh*t.” Hua Hsu suggested that the two titans of hip-hop haven’t managed push each other to stranger, better work because the aesthetic arc of hip-hop now matches the general business narrative of pop culture: “Instead of competition, we now live in a culture that produces mutually beneficial agreements.” (Jon Caramanica called the album “shockingly amiable.” For anybody who knows Jay-Z’s historical tendency toward richly satisfying moments of one-upmanship, that amiability feels like a terminal diagnosis.) Many have noticed that the album’s celebration of aggressive accumulation—“luxury rap, the Hermes of verses,” in West’s words—is not just ten years out of date, it’s out of touch with the streets, whether you walk the lunar streets of East New York, peer through the nearly transparent blocks of empty retail in lower Manhattan, or walk past burnt shops in Croydon. On this disconnect, Jennifer Lena was appropriately blunt in her summary of “Watch the Throne”: “Two fatuous, wealthy rappers celebrating their good fortune in the face of massive global inequality.” The duo’s swipes at social commentary are lost in an album that grabs at a dozen different tools, none of them plugged in; or, as Zach Baron described the album’s approach, “brand partnership mixed uneasily with social advocacy.” (If you needed any evidence that Kanye West lives a little bit in his own world, check his recent announcement from a stage in Norway, where he said: “I’m so thankful to have my voice back, and I want to thank everyone. ‘Watch the Throne’ is No. 1 in twenty-three countries with no press or promotion.”)

It’s not some kind of limp undermining to say that I am impressed that my colleagues found things to say about this album so quickly. On Monday, my reactions were just that—reactive, and largely queasy. I waited for order or logic to assert itself and then, last night, the video for “Otis” débuted. Something, finally, was clear.

The reason Jay-Z and Kanye West are not competitively besting each other is not just that they’re both blindingly successful and aren’t hungry for the hits—it’s because they genuinely like each other. Watch the video again. Now, there are several problems with the video, and they mimic the problems of the album. The video opens with two very rich men approaching a Maybach with a blowtorch and a circular saw. Silly me—I thought they were simply going to destroy the car (which goes for roughly half a million dollars at your corner dealership), which would be a nice response to the overwhelming lack of enthusiasm for Jay-Z ‘s “new watch alert” lyrics. (A title at the end of the video does mention that the car in the video will be auctioned, with proceeds going to benefit victims of the East African drought.)

No—an anonymous team armed with power tools is seen remodeling the Maybach, removing the roof and doors and giving it cantilevered wings. In what looks like an abandoned airstrip, West and Jay-Z drive recklessly and do donuts, while four models screech in the back seat and hang on tight. (On “Watch the Throne,” one of Jay-Z’s best lines is about wanting to see more black women on the walls of the Museum of Modern Art, but only one of the four women in the video is, possibly, of color. Their mission to “redefine black power,” as West calls it, may be more complicated than it sounds.)

What West and Jay-Z do during the video is have a visibly good time, something that’s much harder to fake as an actor than fear, solemnity, or—hey, it’s rap—toughness. If these two guys are competing, I am having a hard time seeing or hearing it. They spend a great deal of the video in physical contact with each other, like brothers mugging for a camera on vacation, and in the world of hip-hop—more riven with homophobia than other genres, granted—most official duos and groups don’t seem that comfortable with each other. (I’ve never seen the RZA and Ghostface Killah hug, and I’m not holding my breath.) That might explain why “Watch the Throne” has such a baffling looseness. The problem isn’t that they recorded it at various locations, compiling verses performed in hotel suites and conversing through the ether; it’s that these two like and respect each other too much to reach the level of murderous focus that great albums demand. This is what many successful bands are not in any way hampered when the members don’t like each other much (cf. The Police, Talking Heads, New Order, Television—this could get really long). When you’re already at loggerheads, it’s easy to say, “Your conceptual ballad about jellyfish and your grandma is shite.” Take the first two songs off of “Watch the Throne,” and all of a sudden it charges out of the gate.

The first song, a mealy galumph called “No Church in the Wild,” is possibly about the Illuminati, which is one of the dullest ideas to plague hip-hop, and it has been kicking around since the nineties. Why rhyme about a secret brotherhood ruling the world when a very not secret brotherhood does? The second song features Beyoncé and the fact that I can’t remember what it is even though it contains Beyoncé is a terrible, terrible thing.

But then the album explodes into a messy sort of workshopping. “Ni**as In Paris” opens with a quote from “Blades of Glory” and then kicks into some hybrid of Texan slow motion and British bass damage, and the ponderous approach evaporates. Or go back to “Otis” for a second, which is based on a few sections of Otis Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness.” This is an obelisk of soul singing—only someone like West, who finds hubris a little weak for his taste, would dare touch it—and it doesn’t even have much of a beat. But as he did with Ray Charles’s “I’ve Got a Woman” on “Golddigger,” West chops up a piano phrase and several guttural ad-libs, and all of a sudden he’s got a trim, unfussy bit of celebratory sound. Under three minutes, “Otis” is a wonderfully subtle throwaway, maybe one of the few songs on “Throne” where West and Jay-Z don’t tackle an issue they’ve only thought through half way. Notable that this is the only track on “Throne” produced by West without the help of any collaborators.

“That’s My Bitch” has the album’s most active beat—a co-production by West, Q-Tip and Jeff Bhasker that rotates and clatters and clips the classic “Apache” break (which now only a very confident human would use yet again). West opens the song by calling up a woman whose name he’s forgotten—his favorite move, being a boor in front of us while drawing attention to it, exulting in his own clumsily organized desires. Jay-Z goes on a great riff about art, including the “put some colored girls in the MOMA” line and an excellent slant rhyme involving Larry Gagosian.

Keep it light, and the album breezes by. When the album reaches for thorny territory, the mind jumps to West’s last album, “My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,” which was all about grandeur and a sense of elevation. West would have been able to pull off something about “black-on-black murder” there, with that kind of white-marble setting. But “Murder to Excellence,” a medley of two songs pointlessly taped together, takes on the topic and sounds like a clumsy campfire singalong (thank producer Swizz Beatz, who fails not once but twice on the same album) complete with a set of free-floating murder statistics that never get tied to a story.

Weed the album down to a healthy ten, and “Watch the Throne” doesn’t become either classic or coherent, but it does work as an entertaining document of two wildly creative, not particularly wound-up friends.

Sasha Frere-Jones worked at The New Yorker as a staff writer and pop-music critic for ten years, beginning in 2004.